


Minor Convenience

by sharkneto



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen, Hurt/Comfort maybe?, I'm not sure how to tag this, Number Five | The Boy Has Issues, Number Five | The Boy-centric, Underage Drinking, no beta we die like ben, once again in the sense that it is five and he is drinking, the mystery is five has feelings, the summary makes this seem much more dramatic than it is, there's diego/patch undertones but they're not super explicit so i marked this gen, they're in that nebulous area of getting back together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 16:09:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,042
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29903673
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sharkneto/pseuds/sharkneto
Summary: They have got to stop meeting like this. Patch once again pulls Five over for underage driving. This time, though, there’s something more to it, and Patch isn’t one to let a mystery go unsolved.
Relationships: Diego Hargreeves/Eudora Patch, Number Five | The Boy & Eudora Patch
Comments: 20
Kudos: 112





	Minor Convenience

“ _Underaged driver reported at Washington and Fifth, heading towards Main.”_

Patch sighs and reaches for the radio. Beaman frowns at her from the driver’s seat. “What are you doing? We’re almost done for the day, let a uniform get it.”

She raises a tired eyebrow at him. “In that area? It’s going to be Diego’s kid brother.” She clicks on the radio to speak, “10-4, Patch and Beaman will get it. We’re nearby.”

They are nearby, only a few blocks away. They were heading back to the precinct from revisiting a messy murder that had happened in the middle of the street. No one saw anything, of course, so there’s not much for them to do until they get ballistics back.

Beaman shakes his head but turns at the next intersection.

She was right. They catch up the familiar brown car a few minutes later, easily recognizable with its HERMES license plate. The figure at the wheel is way too small to be legally driving. Beaman flips on the lights to signal the car to pull over.

He runs the next stop sign.

Patch picks up the radio for the car’s speakers with a sigh. “Five, just pull over. Don’t make this harder.”

He runs another stop sign before he pulls over.

Beaman parks behind him and Patch slides out to go talk to Five. Five smiles unpleasantly through the window at her. She taps it for him to roll it down. He’s being extra difficult tonight and she is not in the mood.

She’s met Five a couple times, now. He’s been back in the Hargreeves’ lives for a few months. Diego had come to her house one night and practically broken her door down with his knocking. He’d cried at the sight of her when she answered and it had taken nearly twenty minutes for him to calm down enough to tell her what was wrong, he was stuttering so badly.

When he finally pulled himself together, he told her the most insane story she had ever heard. Way back when they were kids and Five had disappeared, Five had time traveled himself to the year 2019 where everything had been destroyed. He survived there for forty-five years before he finally made it back to them to try and stop the apocalypse. The Umbrella Academy was successful, they’d stopped it, but in the process Five had dragged his family back to the sixties and then to an alternate universe before they made it back to the correct time and place.

Apparently, she had been killed the first time around, too.

It explained his tears.

Patch is a practical woman. She believes facts as they are given and doesn’t jump to conclusions before she has all her ducks in a row. Diego’s story was insane, completely unbelievable. Which meant she believed him instantly. His life has always been weird, and to make it up isn’t Diego’s style. He’s stubborn and frustrating and insufferable, but he’s trustworthy. She wouldn’t have dated him if he wasn’t.

Any doubts she had about his story were erased when she met Five.

“Good evening, Detective,” Five says, pleasantly. It’s incredibly off-putting.

“We’ve talked about this, Five,” she says, leaning against his car door. “You keep doing this there’s going to start being actual, legal consequences.”

He just widens his smile at her.

“Why aren’t you at home? I thought you guys were having a party for something tonight,” she continues. Diego had invited her to the Academy for some sort of get-together. He’d been incredibly light on details but she’d been planning to swing by after she was done at the precinct.

A shadow crosses Five’s face and he glances away from her. She frowns at that. “I just wanted to go for a drive. Nothing illegal about that,” he says.

She smiles sadly. “There is when you look thirteen.”

He sets his jaw. This is different. Usually when they pull him over for driving, he’s an ass but good naturedly lets them take him in because it means he gets to inconvenience Diego. He teleports out as soon as Diego shows up, which enrages his brother, but it’s a well-established song and dance between Five and the department.

Her instincts are telling her something else is going on here and she wouldn’t be good at her job if she didn’t listen to her instincts.

“What’s the party tonight for, Five?”

Five turns back to her with a sarcastic grin, “Haven’t you heard the good news, Patch? As of tomorrow, I am officially not-dead.”

“That’s great, Five. Congratulations.”

He scoffs. Patch glances back at Beaman. A paper bag tucked behind Five’s seat catches her eye, glass bottles poking out. She freezes. Five can’t be that stupid, can he? He’s supposed to be a genius.

“Please tell me you aren’t driving a car, underaged, with vodka.”

“I’m not driving underaged with vodka,” Five says, not even trying to sound sincere.

“Five,” she sighs. The alcohol changes the situation. It’s not just underaged driving, which they’ve been sweeping under the rug for Diego’s sake. The bottles don’t look like they’re open, but that’s still risking a drinking while driving charge. And he had to have gotten them from somewhere; most liquor stores aren’t stupid enough to sell to such an obvious minor, which means he stole them. 

“I’m not,” he says. He’s playing with her. “I’m not underaged. Yet.”

Patch narrows her eyes. “What do you mean ‘yet’?”

“I mean I will be underaged tomorrow. When I’ll be legally thirteen.” His face twists as he says this.

She’s found the problem. “Wait here a second,” she says and walks back to Beaman.

“We taking him in?” Beaman asks as she opens the passenger door.

“Nope,” Patch says and gathers her bag and the case folder.

“No?”

“No. There’s more to it, today. I think he’ll just teleport if I try to bring him in.”

“Patch.” He catches her attention as she’s about to shut the door. “Are you sure? The Hargreeves aren’t your responsibility.”

She meets his gaze. As far as Beaman knows, Five really is just a thirteen-year-old kid. “He needs someone looking out for him. Today that’s me, I guess. I’ll catch you tomorrow. Let me know if you hear from lab on those ballistics.”

Beaman gives her one last judgmental look before she shuts the door and walks back to Five’s car. She slides into the passenger seat and tucks her bag by her feet. Five raises an eyebrow at her.

“We heading to the station?” he asks dryly.

“No.” Patch crosses her arms and studies him. He’s wearing one of those old Umbrella Academy uniforms. It’s the only outfit she’s ever seen him in, now that she thinks about it. He’s studying her right back. It’s unnerving. He really does look like a thirteen-year-old kid, except for his eyes. There’s a weight to his gaze that tickles at her instincts for _danger_.

She’s pretty sure Diego edited Five’s history when he explained his time-traveling oldest-youngest brother so she could have plausible deniability.

“What’s your plan, then?” Five asks after a long moment.

She shrugs. “I thought I’d check you’re ok and then we could head to your party together.”

“I’m fine and I’m not going.”

He is obviously not fine. He’s usually more subtle about his driving and he had his alcohol out in the open. She doesn’t know Five very well, or at all, but she is familiar enough with him to know he’s meticulous. Five was looking for trouble.

Patch has practice working with difficult and troubled teens. Kids on the street see a lot and have a lot to lose if they get a rep for being a snitch. It takes careful work and consistency to be trusted with their information. Five would hate the comparison, but when the shoe fits…

There’s levels going on here and she’ll start at the easiest.

“What do you mean you’re not going? It’s your party.”

Five shakes his head. “They can have whatever party they want. My presence or absence doesn’t stop them from doing that.”

There seems to be a disconnect between Five and how parties work. Maybe she shouldn’t be surprised by that. He’s probably never been to a party if she understands his history correctly. “You know that the party isn’t actually for you, right? It’s about you but it’s for your siblings. They’re celebrating that you’re back,” Patch explains.

Five is picking at one of his fingernails so he doesn’t have to look at her. It’s a small relief to have his intense attention off of her. It’s also classic avoidance. He feels guilty. “If it’s for them then they’ll have just as good of a time without me there.”

Patch considers the pseudo-child beside her. It’s puzzles like this, figuring out the truth behind people, that she likes about being a detective. That and bringing people justice. It’s so rare she gets to try and solve people puzzles that aren’t drenched in blood.

The party represents something bigger that he’s upset about, which is overshadowing the celebration that his being alive and well after all these years is.

“Why don’t you tell me about being legally thirteen,” she says after a long moment.

Five rolls his eyes. “What’s there to say. Apparently, time travel is an acceptable reason for missing seventeen years but is too farfetched to explain an alternate forty-five years and an accidental age regression.” His voice hardens as he explains.

The set of his jaw makes her think he has more to say on the topic. She waits. Her patience is rewarded when Five huffs and turns to her again. “They brought in their own so-called experts, like they would have any idea of how the math worked. I showed them the equations and do you know what they said? That the math for what I’m talking about doesn’t exist and I must have scrambled myself when I jumped forward. That time travel is currently a hypothetical and it was a fluke I was able to do it once. Jesus Christ, I know! In 2019 the math to do what I did doesn’t exist. I spent forty-five goddamn years inventing the math! But sure, take fucking Rothstein and Matthew’s word for it, the two idiots driving the field in completely the wrong direction with their goddamn ideas about stable temporal relativity…”

Patch doesn’t follow most of what Five says as he rants about the shortfalls of whoever Rothstein and Matthews are. She works to translate the actual meaning of his tirade. It’s pretty straight forward once she gets there.

He wants to be seen for who he is.

“Hey, Five,” she interrupts. He pauses in the middle of an angry explanation about how the fifth dimension doesn’t fit the rigid confines of whatever Rothstein’s formula is. “Do you want to know why they made you legally thirteen?”

“It’s because they’re stupid.”

He surprises her enough with that answer that she smiles. “That could be part of it. But they also couldn’t do anything else.”

“Sure, they could. They could say I’m fifty-eight because that’s how old I am.”

“They couldn’t, Five. I know the system. You look thirteen. Even if they give you an ID or special paperwork that says you’re legally fifty-eight, no one will believe it. You walk into a liquor store, you get behind the wheel, you try and open your own bank account, no amount of paperwork is going to convince anyone that you’re anything but thirteen. I’m sorry.”

Five frowns at the steering wheel, jaw clenched. “They changed my birthday,” he mumbles.

“Hm?”

“To make it _easier_.” Sarcasm drips off that last word. “October 1, 2005. So that I’ll be fourteen next month.”

Patch does the math as fast as she can. “And you’d have preferred 1960?”

“I’d have _preferred_ 1989 because that’s my fucking birthday.”

With all his siblings.

There’s not really anything Patch can do for him. It’s just a rough situation. She does understand why he doesn’t want to celebrate with is family. It feels almost perverse, now. They have good intentions but from Five’s point of view they’re celebrating the erasure of his entire life for the sake of convenience.

“What do you want to do?” she asks.

Five raises an eyebrow at her.

“You were having one last big night on the town, right? As an adult? Okay. What was the plan?”

He shrugs. “I hadn’t gotten that far into it. I was going to see where it took me.”

She’s not surprised. His current predicament doesn’t feel very thought-out.

He is Diego’s brother.

It’s also a very thirteen-year-old plan, but she doesn’t tell him that.

“So, driving. Drinking. What else is on the list?” she asks instead.

Five considers that for a long moment. “Strippers? I haven’t had sex in a fucking age.”

Patch chokes on her own spit. She coughs, hard. When she recovers, she looks up to see Five grinning crookedly at her.

What a little shit.

“I’m married, anyway. I wouldn’t do that to Delores,” he says, still smirking at her reaction.

She makes the executive decision to not ask about that. Like most things with Five, it’s probably very complicated. And if it means she doesn’t have to deny a man twice her age who looks like a child access to strippers, she is automatically in favor of it.

What she’s about to do is a bad idea.

She should just take Five to the precinct, let Diego pretend to pick him up so Five will teleport away and not be her problem anymore. Let the Hargreeves take care of themselves. They’re all so messed up from their superhero childhood, it’s not anything she can help with.

And yet.

Fuck, she blames Diego. He is a bad influence.

Patch pulls out her phone and texts him. Done, she slides it back into her pocket and clicks her seat belt on.

“I have an idea. I’ll show you where to drive,” she says.

Five quirks an eyebrow at her. “Are you sure you want to let a minor drive? It’s illegal.”

There is a right answer here and she knows what it is. “I’m willing to let an unlicensed senior citizen drive me a few blocks.”

He hides his small smile in his shoulder as he buckles his seat belt. He actually is a good driver when he’s not trying to piss off law enforcement. Patch wonders who taught him as she directs him across town.

Fifteen minutes later she points him to park in front of a house. Five squints up at it. “Who lives here?”

“I do. Come on.”

Five disappears from his seat with a flash. She turns to see him reappear on her porch before he’s gone again, already inside. Patch turns off the car and pockets the keys. She has the absent thought of how lucky they are that he was raised to be a hero as she walks up her stairs. He has the potential to be an almost unstoppable criminal, when he can just jump anywhere he wants to like that.

Inside, she drops her bag in the entry and sets the case file on the coffee table. She left Five’s alcohol in his car; hopefully he’ll forget about it. He probably won’t. Five is already in her kitchen, poking around like he’s looking for something.

“Anything I can help you find?” she asks. He shakes his head with a frown and checks the lock on her back door. She has a response from Diego so she deals with that while Five continues to scope out her house. He seems satisfied with whatever he was looking for a few minutes later after checking every room, upstairs and down.

He rejoins her in the living room, standing while she sits on the couch. “You had a plan?”

She shrugs. “The plan is do what you want. I get why you might want to avoid the celebration with your siblings but I also can’t let you just wander the streets. I let Diego know where you are. He’s pissed but he’ll survive.”

“Huh,” Five says. He sinks onto the couch next to her. “What are things you’re not allowed to do when you’re thirteen?”

Patch blinks. She supposes he wouldn’t know, would he? “Um. You got the big things. Driving, drinking. R-rated movies. Get a tattoo?”

“Already got one of those,” he says, absently rubbing his forearm. “That’s boring, I’m going to do those things anyway.”

“I think tonight is more about the symbolic.”

Five tilts his head in concession. Patch thinks some more. “I think I have a cigar somewhere. You can’t smoke when you’re thirteen either.”

He wrinkles his nose in distaste. “I breathed in enough smoke for a decade, we can skip that one.”

She is relieved by that. “Violent movie it is.” She is not going to watch a sexually explicit film with a technical minor. Just the thought of doing that makes her want to vomit. Five seems more like a gratuitous violence kind of guy, anyway.

“What do you like on your pizza?” she asks, pulling out her phone.

Five shrugs.

Time to rephrase the question. “What do you not like on your pizza?”

“I don’t care what is or isn’t on pizza. Why are we talking about pizza?”

“We can’t have a movie night without pizza. It’s the law.”

“Oh, and we’re really following the law tonight.”

Patch smiles. “All we have here is two adults doing normal things friends do together. Nothing wrong with that.”

Five ducks his head to hide another smile.

She gets two pizzas. One cheese, one with everything. Her bases are covered in case Five is actually a picky eater. She excuses herself to use the bathroom.

He’s paging through the case file when she comes back, an opened bottle of vodka next to him. He did not wait long to retrieve his alcohol. She knows she set up this exact situation but she still has to stop herself from grabbing the bottle out of his reach. For one, he’s an adult man. Two, he’ll probably just teleport it back and be mad about it.

She grabs a glass and ice for him instead. 

“Here, I should have put that away properly,” she says as he pours himself a healthy double, moving to shuffle the papers back together and tuck them out of the way.

“No, it’s alright. It’s interesting. Unique use of a Mossberg.”

Patch freezes. She shouldn’t talk about open cases with people outside of the investigation. But he’s already flipped through it and after looking at it for maybe a minute has a definite opinion on a methodology they’re still piecing together. “Oh?”

Five flips to the photos of the body. She studies his face for a reaction to the bloody corpse. He squints at its gory chest with a detached, clinical interest. “Your shooter was either very good or very lucky,” he says.

“What makes you say that?”

“A shot straight to the heart with a slug at a suboptimal range? Your guy either knows exactly what he’s doing or got lucky.”

“Tell me more,” she says, stepping closer to better look at the pictures.

Five glances at her in surprise. “I mean, most of the information is already in your notes. Messy entry with no exit; that’s a bullet that’s losing velocity and doesn’t have enough oomph to punch through to the other side of the rib cage after breaking through the sternum. Slugs have high stopping power but aren’t necessarily quickly lethal unless they’re targeted at specific points. I’d estimate with the damage and the spatter pattern you’ve got here that this was middle-end of range. Most common shotgun for accuracy is a Mossberg, probably a 500 or 590, I’d lean towards a 500 unless they’ve made more models I don’t know about since the eighties. Angle mimics a straight-forward hit but that makes no sense for visibility of the area at around 300 yards, so he must have been above on a rooftop and hit his target when he was angled upwards for whatever reason. Honestly, a pretty clean job. So, like I said, either a guy who knows exactly what he was doing to account for the slowing velocity to muddle the evidence or a fortunate newbie with a grudge who lucked out with the perfect angle with a random gun he happened to get his hands on.”

Patch blinks at him. There are three reasons for Five to have that sort of familiarity with ballistics and guns, and she knows he wasn’t law enforcement or military.

She works to reign in her whirling thoughts. It depends on what the lab says in the morning but if they match what Five just said, they need to check nearby rooftops for evidence. To get all that information from just an incomplete file means Five has _a lot_ of experience in this.

Diego definitely edited his explanation of Five’s past.

It’s concerning.

Five flips back to read the spatter analysis while he sips his vodka.

Patch pours a drink of her own and studies Five.

He drinks confidently and quickly; he’s already almost finished with his glass. The way he’s throwing it back tells her he is no stranger to drinking. The alcohol is already relaxing him, flushing his cheeks, but she thinks if he wasn’t stuck in his little thirteen-year-old body he’d be able to drink just about anyone under the table.

Who the hell is Number Five Hargreeves?

She’s broken from her thoughts as the doorbell rings. Pizza is here. Patch gets the food and pays while Five tucks the case file away again. Five has zero preference for pizza, taking a few pieces of the everything just because it has more stuff on it and not out of any real want for the toppings.

They watch _Inglorious Basterds_. It’s the most violent movie she can think of. She spends most of it watching Five watch the movie. Five is three large drinks in and sits bonelessly cocooned by the couch. He makes comments every once in a while, usually to correct how a weapon is used, a few times on historical accuracy.

“Were you in Nazi Germany?” Patch asks him.

Five nods, gaze drunk and distant.

“Did you kill Nazis?”

“Some.”

“You helped end World War Two?” She’s incredulous.

Five’s answering smile is bitter and he takes a sip of his drink instead of saying anything.

Patch drops it immediately.

When the movie ends, Five keeps staring at the black screen. Patch is buzzed. Five is plastered. She cut him off a little while ago and he hasn’t noticed that she’s replaced his drink with water.

Unprompted, Five says, “Did you know I’m going to have legal guardians?”

It takes her a moment to realize he’s talking about being thirteen again. “That makes sense, from a legal standpoint,” she says.

He scoffs and shakes his head. “I have taken care of myself, all alone, for forty-five years, and suddenly I need Luther and Vanya to look after me? It’s a load of bullshit.”

Patch thinks it will probably be really good for him to have others looking out for him. The context of it, though, has to sting. “It’s just a formality, right?” she asks.

“It’s, it’s, it’s the other way around,” he slurs, flopping back so he’s staring at the ceiling. He heaves a sigh. “They’re so goddamn young, you know? So much life to do stuff with. I protect them. They don’t need to protect me, I take care of myself. I’m the one who keeps them out of danger, keeps them safe and alive.”

“You’re a family. You all keep each other safe, right?”

Five snorts and sends her a sloppy, incredulous look.

She frowns. “They’re adults, Five. They can take care of themselves, too.”

“Yeah, that’s why they’ve died three times.” He shakes his head.

Patch is out of her depth. She can’t navigate the minefield that is Five’s life, not when she barely knows anything concrete about him and he’s drunk. Technically, she knows she’s died before and Five undid it with his time traveling. Logic says that’s what he’s done for his siblings, too. Three times.

That is a heavy responsibility.

“It’s a different situation, now, though, right? You guys saved the world. The threat is passed. Maybe it’s time to try a new dynamic,” Patch tries.

Five just shrugs. A moment later he rolls to stand up, swaying slightly as he gets his bearings.

“Where are you going?” she asks, bemused. He’s not in any shape to be heading anywhere. It’s why she contained him at her house instead of leaving him to wander the city.

“I gotta piss.”

Well, he has drunk a lot. She watches him shuffle around the corner to the bathroom down the hall.

Her phone had buzzed a few times during the movie and she’d ignored it. She checks it now. One update from Beaman – ballistics look like they probably corroborate Five’s theory. The rest are from Diego. He is pissed at Five for bailing on the family.

Well, he’s trying to come off pissed. Patch knows him too well for that.

He’s just hurt his brother didn’t want to celebrate with them.

She sends him an update: Five is fine, very drunk, and just needed some space.

Diego’s response of some choice words to forward on to his brother makes her smile.

“I don’t get it.”

Patch looks up from her phone to see Five, back from the bathroom, leaning against the corner and frowning at her.

“Don’t get what?”

“You.” He sloppily gestures at her, in case it wasn’t clear he was talking about her.

She leans back in her chair and tries to clamp down on the smile tugging at her lips. She actually wants nothing more than to get Five’s drunk opinion on her.

Five squints at her, a small crease between his eyebrows. His hair is all mussed from how he was laying on the couch. He tugged his tie loose at some point during the movie.

He’s adorable.

“Everything about you points to you being smart,” he starts. “You’re good at your job, you solve crimes, you’re obviously respected by your peers.”

He’s being too nice. Patch schools her expression and asks, “But?”

“You like Diego.”

She grins. Honestly, she wonders the same damn thing. “He’s got a good heart. And he means well,” she says.

Five’s expression relaxes into a fond smile. “He does.” He pushes himself out of his lean so he can turn and fall onto the couch. With a quiet groan, he stretches. His umbrella tattoo peaks out as his sleeve rides up with the motion.

“He’s still stupid, though,” Five adds after he lets his arms flop back down.

Patch chuckles. “Yeah, he can be pretty dumb.”

Silence hangs between them. Five wiggles himself into a comfier position on the couch and closes his eyes.

“I have a guest bed,” Patch offers.

He twitches a hand to wave her off, eyes still closed. “I’ve slept on worse. Moving is too much work.”

Refusing to think about just how much worse Five probably slept on in the apocalypse, she gets up and grabs a better pillow from the guest room for him. When she hands it to him, he hugs it to his chest instead of tucking it under his head. Something about that motion pangs deep in her chest. Gently, she pulls a blanket from the back of the couch and spreads it over him.

He looks tiny, covered up and curled around the pillow.

“How’d we do, Five? Did we go out on fifty-eight with a bang?”

“Excellent job. I feel so old,” he mumbles.

She smiles at that.

Patch spends the next few minutes quietly cleaning up from their little party. There’s not actually much to do, just put the leftover pizza in the fridge, but she wants to be sure Five is actually asleep and alright. The back of the couch and how he’s hugging the pillow are keeping him on his side, so she’s not too worried he’ll accidentally asphyxiate if he throws up in the middle of the night.

She sits back down in her chair and just studies him, rubbing her lucky rabbit’s foot as she thinks. His face is lax and he breathes deeply and evenly.

He looks really, really young.

As much as he hates the packaging, having his siblings officially there to look out for him will probably be really good for him. She’s no expert in psychology, but she’s not totally ignorant on it, either. Not with the job she has. Trauma is something she is very familiar with. She works with traumatized people every day, trying to get their stories so she can help solve a crime and bring them closure.

In her experience, trauma has a way of freezing people, trapping them in that moment and who they were there. She hopes her work to bring closure helps them move past that, along with whatever therapy they can find.

All these thoughts coming together, Patch thinks Five is a little more thirteen than he lets on. He was plopped into a nightmare scenario when he was still just a kid and did a phenomenal job adapting to survive through it, but that means there’s a part of him that never left that first moment of landing there. He can’t let that part show, though, because he’s already fighting an uphill battle with his appearance to get people to see him as an adult. Maybe being legally thirteen will give him an avenue to let a little bit of that out, let him actually grow up.

She hopes, at least.

Patch leans back in her chair with a sigh. Five is a lot, even without trying to figure out where in his long life he became familiar enough with crime scenes to analyze one with a glance or time traveled to Nazi Germany. The evening was unexpectedly nice, though. She doesn’t know what she thought the night would be like when she decided on this, spur of the moment, but she did genuinely have a nice time with Five. Hopefully it was what he needed.

With a groan, she gets up from her chair and heads to bed, remembering at the last minute that she doesn’t actually know when Five needs to be at the courthouse to sign the paperwork to legally rejoin the land of the living. A quick text to Diego fixes that. Seven o’clock, sharp.

That’s going to come earlier than either she or Five will like.

Her alarm goes off at 5:30, as it does every morning. Patch spends a moment staring at her ceiling before remembering the night before and that she needs to be sure Five is up and ready. She throws off her wonderful, warm covers, rolls out of bed, and pads downstairs.

Five is where she left him: on the couch, curled around the pillow. Patch steps over to gently shake him awake. “Hey, Five,” she whispers.

His whole body stiffens and his eyes snap open as he inhales sharply. He immediately winces and holds a hand up to his forehead. “Jesus Christ,” he mumbles.

She smiles. “I’ll get the coffee going. We’ve gotta get you downtown in an hour.”

“Hngh,” Five says as he sits up, still holding his head.

Patch delivers a steaming cup of black coffee to him a couple minutes later, along with a bottle of aspirin. He takes both gratefully.

“That hangover feel like a thirteen-year-old’s hangover?” she asks him.

He flips her the bird. She laughs.

Five waves off her offer for breakfast, so Patch just makes herself some toast. She assesses Five as she eats it. She’s not going to lie, he’s in rough shape. He definitely looks like he had a long night of drinking. His uniform is rumpled from sleeping in it, his hair is a mess, and his eyes are bloodshot. It’s really not a good look for heading into a courthouse to officially become a minor.

“We need to get you cleaned up,” she says. Five just grunts in agreement as he downs his coffee. “You can use the shower upstairs. I don’t know if there’s much I can do for your clothes, though, and I don’t think we’ll have time to stop at your house on the way over.”

He sets the empty mug down. “Do you have an iron?”

She rolls her eyes. Of course she has an iron.

Half an hour later, Patch comes back downstairs from getting ready for the day herself. Five is in the living room, freshly showered and standing in an undershirt and boxers, long socks pulled all the way up, while he irons the rest of his uniform. He looks leagues better than he did before, coffee and aspirin doing their work to beat back his doozy of a hangover.

He irons with a practiced hand, quickly smoothing the wrinkles from his shirt and shorts. Jacket on and tie in place, Patch can barely tell he’d been plastered the night before.

“Ready to go?” she asks.

“As I’ll ever be.”

As they step onto the porch together, Patch tosses him the car keys. He catches them on reflex and quirks an eyebrow at her when he realizes what she’s given him. “One last drive?” she says.

Five gives her a small smile and disappears in a flash. Patch joins him in the car a few moments later.

The drive to the courthouse is uneventful. Five easily maneuvers the early morning traffic, only honking at a few other drivers. She isn’t sure what they were doing wrong that required a honk, but she doesn’t say anything.

It’s a big day for him.

At the last stop sign before they turn to the courthouse, Five stops and doesn’t start again. Patch turns to him with a small frown. His grip on the wheel is tight and there’s a small crease between his brows. He’s staring straight ahead.

“Hey,” she says quietly. He glances at her. “This doesn’t actually change anything. It’s just a piece of paper. You’ll still be you. Fifty-eight and a pain in the ass.”

He forces a smile at her. It’s rough. He sighs. “It’s just a piece of paper. It doesn’t matter.”

They still sit there. Another car is coming down the block. They have a little time, though, before it reaches them.

“I’m sorry there’s not a better solution, Five,” she says. “If you need someone outside of your family to talk to about all the missing time, to help make it more real, you can always come by me.”

“I can’t but thank you.”

Patch smiles at him. “If this is about preserving some plausible deniability for me, you need to give me more credit. I can read between the lines just fine. I know you’ve gotten into some shady stuff, Five. I know what I’m offering.” She’s already had to look the other way for some things Diego has pulled. It grates on her, but she reasons his actions have actually helped make the city a safer place. He’s been able to get into places that she had her hands tied from bureaucratic tape and has saved lives because of it.

Five looks at her, really looks at her, with a small, sad smile. As young as he looked last night, he looks every one of his fifty-eight years right now. He shakes his head, more to himself than to her.

The car behind them honks.

They start driving again.

His family is simple to find as they pull up to the courthouse steps. Luther, alone, is easy to spot from the end of the block. All five of them turn as the car stops, most of them sporting very forced smiles. Five stares flatly back at them through the windshield.

Nobody seems like they’re going to move so Patch takes the initiative and opens her car door with a loud _click._ Five follows her a moment later with a reluctant sigh, stepping out and walking around the car instead of teleporting to his family.

Allison walks forward to meet him, her smile the least forced looking of the siblings, with an arm outstretch to greet her brother. Five teleports to the other side of his family just before she can reach him. “Let’s get this over with,” he says, marching up the steps and not looking behind him to check if they’re following.

Vanya chases after Five, a to-go cup of coffee in her hand. Five slows to let her catch up.

With a sigh, Allison lets her arm drop. Noticing Patch’s questioning look, she explains, “He’s mad I didn’t Rumor them into making him fifty-eight.”

Patch hadn’t thought of that. “Could you?”

Allison grimaces. “Technically, yes. But it would have taken a lot of Rumors to a lot people and more knowledge on the whole process than I have to be sure it all was filed correctly and wouldn’t come bite us in the ass in a few months. So no, not practically.”

“He’ll come around,” Patch says.

Her expression says she doesn’t expect Five to mellow very quickly on that, but Allison still returns her smile before she heads after Five and Vanya. Luther follows her, shooting Patch a parting smile and a nod.

Klaus and Diego are the last two remaining Hargreeves. Klaus lounges on the steps, cigarette in hand as his gaze flicks between her and Diego. Diego levels him with a pointed look. Klaus raises an eyebrow in response. “Klaus,” Diego says.

With mock offense, Klaus leverages himself up. Holding his hands in surrender, he dramatically turns to start up the stairs. “Excuuuuse me. Sorry for potentially infringing on this very sexy, romantic moment on the courthouse steps at the ass-crack of the day. Your taste is impeccable, nothing gets my rocks off, either, like the moment before my oldest, legally dead brother is about to become my youngest, legally alive brother. Enjoy your moment.” He waves behind to them. GOODBYE.

Diego rolls his eyes. Patch smiles.

They stand in the silence for a moment, together. “He behave alright?” Diego asks, both of them still watching his family crest the steps.

“We had a good time.”

Diego turns to frown at her. “Most people don’t use ‘Five’ and ‘good time’ in the same sentence.”

“We did,” she defends. “Although you’re going to have to explain to me how he can recognize a suboptimal shotgun kill shot from a postmortem picture and how he ended up in Nazi Germany.”

“Jesus Christ, Five,” he mumbles, holding a hand up to run it through his hair but aborting the motion at the last moment. Patch huffs a laugh.

There’s a beat of silence. Patch turns to the car with a frown. Her car is still at the precinct. Diego notices her predicament. “You can just take that one. We can sort it out later.”

“I don’t have the keys.”

“Hey, Five!” Diego bellows, startling Patch. Five turns, just about to enter the courthouse. Diego holds a hand above his head. “Keys!”

There’s a small flash in his hand and when he brings it back down the keys are there. He passes them to her. He holds on to them a moment longer than necessary, their hands touching.

Patch should actually be getting to the precinct; Beaman will be waiting for her with the full ballistics report. Still, she pauses for a second, waiting for Diego to say whatever he’s holding back.

“What did you guys do together?” he asks awkwardly.

“Why, you getting jealous?”

Diego splutters. Patch takes pity on him. “We just watched a movie and ate some pizza. He got really drunk. That’s it. Quiet night.”

“And he couldn’t do that at home, oh yeah, I understand.” He scoffs.

Patch reaches out for his arm to give him a gentle squeeze. “He was overwhelmed. He just needed some space.”

She can tell Diego doesn’t get it. He’s too hurt that Five ditched them all for a seemingly inconsequential evening. She tries to explain, “He’s worried his past is going to be erased, that you’ll all forget he’s fifty-eight and seen shit.”

Diego’s expression folds in confusion. “How can we ever forget he’s fifty-eight if he never shuts up about being fifty-eight.”

“Still.” She shrugs. “He really hates that he’s going to be legally thirteen and that overshadowed any excitement for celebrating the happy moment. His original plan was to get plastered and wander the city. I just stepped in to contain him at my house, at least.”

“Thanks, for that,” he says, slightly distracted. He is processing the situation from Five’s point of view. He’s not the fastest at considering things from other’s perspectives, but he gets there.

“Don’t mention it.” Another silent beat. “You should catch up with your family and I need to get to work.”

Diego blinks, just realizing all his siblings are now in the building and it is creeping alarmingly close to Five’s appointment time to sign his official paperwork. “Yeah. I can’t miss how mad Allison is going to get when he signs all the documents with a numerical five.”

They share a smile. Diego gets a few steps away when he turns back to her. “We still good for Thursday?”

Patch nods. “Wouldn’t miss it.”

He smiles at her, easy and lopsided. She can’t help her smile back.

In the car, she’s about to drive away when, on an impulse, she rolls down the passenger window. “Diego!” she calls. He spins to face her, halfway up the steps. “Sorry I missed your party last night!”

“That’s alright!” he shouts back. “I heard there was this real crotchety old man who needed your help. Just a miserable time for you both. You can make it up to me with another date!”

“I’ll pencil you in!”

Diego flips her a small wave, beaming. Patch drives the few blocks to the precinct, a smile of her own on her lips.

**Author's Note:**

> Current topic on my mind: how horrifying it would be to go from being an adult to stuck as a kid. The amount of autonomy you would lose would be infuriating. Five is a guy who rolls with the punches because his alternative is to curl up in a little ball and die, so he'd take this in stride, too, but it wouldn't be easy. Everyone around him would see him and think "oh a child" and treat him as such. Even his siblings, who know, are going to slip up about it. Five is so proud, he would hate every moment of it. But he really doesn't have a choice and it was his own damn fault because he messed up the equation. A minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things that he was dealing with at the moment that now has major consequences as he stares at a wide-open future.
> 
> I really do think there's a not-insignificant part of him that is stuck at thirteen, developmentally, so if he got to a point where he could lean into it would be really, really good for him and he'd get to actually grow up. I like headcanons that are out there that he looks thirteen because that's what he subconsciously felt, or that was the only body in that timeline that he could take - that his blame on messing up the equation is a justification for himself when it was actually totally out of his control. 
> 
> Finally, I love Patch. She got done dirty dying for Diego's manpain. I love how she talks, I love how calm she is. A breath of fresh air after the insanity that is the Hargreeves. I liked Diego/Lila in S2 but the whole time I was mentally screaming "Patch only died three months ago!" If Patch is back in S3 I wouldn't be mad about it.
> 
> The usual! No beta, so let me know if there's anything wonky going on so I can edit it up. I love hearing your thoughts, either in the comments or you can drop me a line on tumblr, also at sharkneto.


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